Bad UX Roundup: LinkedIn Edition

Five hilariously bad blunders. The last one is breathtaking.

Here’s a story.

When I originally published my Yahoo article in 2016, I did not publish it on Medium, but LinkedIn. At some point, I went to edit the article, and suddenly all my images disappeared after I hit save. When I wrote to tech support for an explanation, things only got weirder. First, they asked me to send them the images that disappeared. Yes, my images were gone, and clearly they would know better than I where they had gone, but I had to send them the images. When I balked at this, the person said to just send one, which I did. Then, after a long delay, they asked me to send all of them. Instead of doing that, I just took the article down.

The tag team of incompetence from tech support and development perfectly encapsulates the overall culture at LinkedIn. Remember when I talked about styles of stupidity? LinkedIn’s style is best described as oblivious. Just as the tech support staff were oblivious to logic and common sense, the product management and UX designers are oblivious to the principles of design. LinkedIn consistently exhibits a cheerful disregard for even the most commonly known best practices, whether it is the lack of click-drag to upload files or the fact that clicking on your network doesn’t actually take you to your network. And let’s not forget this gem:

The funny thing is that, unlike Facetweet and Pinstagram, LinkedIn actually charges many of its users, so one might think they would treat us like customers. But that implies that LinkedIn’s UX sucks due to contempt toward the users. I don’t think that’s the case. I think they are just that dumb. I think they may have poached “talent” from the late Yahoo. Don’t believe me? Just read through these five blunders, and wait till you see the last one.

You cannot put bullet points in profiles… unless you know the “hack”.

If you are describing yourself professionally to an audience of busy decision makers, you probably want to summarize your qualifications in a list form. CEOs and bombarded hiring managers don’t want to read your rambling paragraphs and the extra verbiage needed to link your sentences together coherently. Bullet points provide a two-dimensional structure to your self-description that lets the reader scan and compartmentalize the information. Why do you think I summarize the UX lessons in these articles in bulleted lists?

Therefore, it stands to reason that LinkedIn would make it easy to put bullet points in your profile. Well, it doesn’t. It can be done, but not only is there no control in the interface to do it, LinkedIn’s own documentation says nothing on the matter. Only third party writers will tell you how to do it. As such, I guess you could call it a hack. The same applies to LinkedIn’s product managers.

Important lessons

• If you let users create text content, make it easy to format it. I’m looking at you, old Reddit.
• Don’t make your documentation so shitty that third parties have to pick up your slack.

ProFinder has no link back to regular LinkedIn.

If you are on the ProFinder subdomain (a freelancing service), there is seemingly no way to click back to the main LinkedIn site. That logo in the top left does not take you home.

I searched all over the page and found exactly one link back to LinkedIn.com and it was at the very bottom of the site, under the links that nobody clicks on. In fact, it doesn’t even look like a link. It’s the copyright text. THAT is the link.

Would it kill them to have some sort of “Back to home” button in the top left of the page? I realize that making this work/look right would require a deft touch, and they have more of a daft touch but seriously…

Important lessons

• Make it easy to get back to the home page of your website, or home screen of your app, or basically the default home state of whatever software you make.
• Don’t hide important links in the copyright tag, or any text that doesn’t look like a link.

LinkedIn ProFinder‘s illogical options

When a client uses ProFinder to post a job, they have the option of specifying whether they wish to work with the provider in person, virtually, or if they do not have a preference.

The assumption would be that you could only select one of these, because they are mutually exclusive. You either prefer virtual or in person, which excludes the other as well as the ambivalent option, or you are ambivalent which excludes either of the preferences. Simple, right? Not to LinkedIn.

This is how client preferences look to the provider receiving them:

So, you do not prefer one or the other, BUT you only want to work with the designer in person, BUT you are comfortable working virtually? Got it.

If a provider is new to ProFinder, they might see this in the request and just assume the client is an idiot and pass up on the job. I am sure that clients do not like the idea that LinkedIn’s shitty UX is narrowing their pool of options. The fact that ProFinder does not require the client to select just one of these options is paralleled only by the fact that it lists the choices on a single line rather than bulleting them (I guess we already know LinkedIn has an aversion to bullets), which further makes it look like something a clueless client would type. At least putting it into bullet format might hint that it was a problem with the system and not the user.

Important lessons

• Forms should provide constraints such that users cannot enter in illogical data.
• Do not present contradictory information to the user.
• Format lists in bulleted form, not as a line of text.

The back button on the LinkedIn profile controls the view of an avatar

Try this.

Go to somebody’s profile.

Click their photo, and it will pop up an enlarged version.

Click anywhere that is not the photo, and it will make the enlarged photo disappear.

Now, hit the back button…

Rather than going back to whatever page I was on before landing on Woz’s profile, it pops his mug back up again.

This means that LinkedIn treats an enlarged photo as a step in web navigation. I don’t think any user views it that way, and thus it ruins the mental model of the back/forward buttons. Nobody hits the back button wanting to make a picture pop back up. If we compared navigating a clickstream in your browser to turning pages in a book, the LinkedIn image modal would be like the pop-ups in a kids’ book. Turning the page would automatically make them retract.

It’s little details like this that really illustrate LinkedIn’s general lack of interest in the user experience.

Important lessons

• Work with the user’s mental model, not against it.
• Minor modals (such as LinkedIn avatars or the Facebook posting form) are not part of the clickstream.

LinkedIn makes it almost impossible to find your followers.

Did you think I was clickbaiting when I told you this was breathtaking? Well, I was, but that doesn’t mean it was a lie. This is a new level. In fact, I had to spend a little extra time researching this one, just to be sure I wasn’t mistaken, because it’s so unbelievably stupid that I had a hard time accepting this was really true. But it is. Oh God, it is.

If you use LinkedIn, you can probably think of a few places that a count of your followers would appear. One of them is on your home screen, on the left, where it counts how many views your profile received.

Nope. No luck there.

Another possibility is on my profile page, where my “dashboard” appears.

Nope, not there.

What about on the My Network page?

Wrong again. What could be going on here?

If you don’t already know the answer, you can stop trying to guess, because you’re going to be wrong every time. There is only one way to see your followers, and even your follower count, and calling it illogical is selling it short; it’s closer to Dadaist. Here it is.

First I go to my feed, and I click the meatballs button in the top right of any post.

Then I click “Improve my feed”, which takes me to this page. It is a list of suggested people and companies to follow. It is still not my list of followers.

As you can see, at the top, there is a count of the people you are following and then, finally, your followers. Clicking on that will take you to a similar list of followers. As far as I am aware, as of the publication of this article, that is the only way to see a list of your followers, other than a direct link.

Here is a screenshot of the only LinkedIn help page on the subject:

I have seen a lot of dumb UX design over the years, but this ranks near the very bottom of the heap. The sheer lack of logic, the obliviousness, and the blithe admission in their help documentation all combine to demonstrate why LinkedIn are possibly the reigning kings of shit UX. Even though it is obvious and intuitive to anyone with the IQ of a weevil, let me break it down into information architecture terms.

• Followers are an attribute of a user, not a piece of content. Therefore, it is wrong to link to your followers from your content.
• Your followers are an attribute of you. Therefore it is wrong to link from another user to your followers.
• LinkedIn compounds these mistakes by requiring you to go through a piece of content belonging to someone else to view followers belonging to you.

Then there is the fact that “improve my feed” in no way suggests anything about seeing your followers. Your followers do not affect your feed, only those that you follow. Nobody would ever think to click this link when looking for a list of their followers.

Combine that IA insanity and crappy labeling with the fact that it is all hidden behind a mystery meat button that is located on the user’s feed, a place where ephemeral updates are located, not fixed data, and you have perfectly un-findable information.

Oh, and one more thing: your list of followers does not indicate whether those followers are your LinkedIn connections or not, requiring you to click on each of them to find out. But given the preceding tour de force of idiocy, why would I expect any such attention to detail?

Important lessons

• Do not hide useful information, especially not behind the most improbable location you can conceive.
• Before you waste your users’ time on interviews, maybe look at your own documentation. If you have to explain something in a help file, you probably designed it wrong.
• If you care about user experience, LinkedIn is not the company for you.

Want more of me?

After you’re done getting your head checked, you can find me at these places.

LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jclauss/

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http://blackmonolith.co/publications

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